Scaling the size of the claim with the size of the mining operation is a really good idea. Holding a claim open is another problem - I would suggest that it must remain permanently occupied and/or in operation. Otherwise people could just send out hundreds of tiny probes to blanket a body or large area, effectively claiming the whole region.
Its a great pity. Its also throwing away what may be a perfectly good human body. Someone could have used that for something, like sex slave or medical experiments or something - he could even be a crash test dummy for other cars, maybe Teslas.:D Criminals are such wasters...
Its either busses or trucks that are the number one killers of cyclists. Heavy, slow moving and surrounded by blind spots, and if you go under the wheels of a truck or bus there's pretty much no coming back. Squelch! Very often the driver wont even know they've hit someone.
Yep. No matter how bad we are and how enslave our people the other side will always find a way to be worse. Don't much fancy China's ideas of human rights, or of health and safety, or 'freedom of speech'. Space dominated by the Russians or the Arab kingdoms could be even worse.
BTW - this kind of large scale asteroid mining or any large scale stuff in space is basically all impossible without nuclear rockets.
- Settling a colony anywhere out in space will require sovereignty, + any kind of confrontation out there will require weapons, so the first thing people will need to do is to get rid of some of those international treaties. Getting those self-serving UN bureaucrats to write laws about space has created a load of stupid unworkable laws unfit for any purpose except blocking all progress. A bit like their environmental work, or tackling world poverty, or justice, morality, actually almost everything they do. (Like the UK government most of the time they would do a better job if all just killed and stuffed and mounted in their seats.:D )
I totally agree with the article. For the application I am designing (admittedly a pretty special one) this problem means that it turns out to be easier to cut everything out and build a complete new system from first principles. At the top level there just isn't quite the level of control there and delving deeper on how to do things at a system-API level reveals a nightmare world of complexity and still insufficient control. At the next level Microsoft is totally out because everything is proprietary and hidden and the licence basically forbids it anyway. Even Linux isn't much better once you dig down deep enough (though the documentation is there) - most practical installations depend on proprietary code - but even when that barrier isn't there this is a system (ie effectively a big program) that has evolved organically for decades. It gets immensely complex if you have to rewrite an underlying part of that system. But all of this is only getting to the real punch-line, that thicket of evolution doesn't end at the OS and goes right through the driver and into the hardware... and that makes it an almost impossible job to reverse engineer to build a new clean OS for even the most basic operation. The OS layer is the real reason that everything above has become so complex.
If you really want a clean system for programming then its simplest to go with embedded microcontrollers like Arduino, or machines like the Raspberry Pi that is complex but is designed to hide it. Or if a little braver you can use Verilog or VHDL and use FPGA to literally build the whole thing up from the ground level. That way you can control everything. Of course doing it this way is why my dev timeline is 5 to 10 years rather than 2 or 3 years - but then my project is at the frontiers of research... (cackles manically and runs off)
So in other words you believe your perception, backed up by nothing, to be actual fact and you intend to conduct your professional life accordingly. I can tell you if I had to choose between you and almost anybody else who would get the interview.
Here's a hint to work on your thinking a bit: you know anything about government employees because it is possible to learn things about them. You know nothing about the fraud, waste, and abuse rampant in the private sector because their records are not open, their employees' records are not accessible, and their everyday decisions don't have to be made knowing some armchair quarterback will criticize your every move. So you move carefully.
Add to that the constant media drumbeat designed to reinforce your perceptions because government properly run is the ONLY effective countermeasure to corporate excess and you have, well, you.
Most of that drumbeat comes from the evil empire of the Murdock's. They have done everything they can to corrode and corrupt and destroy government power and democracy in countries throughout the world, especially in the US and UK. Every bit of venomous hate towards the US government, the psychotic conspiracy theory mind-set, the actual birth of the neo-cons themselves, the election of at least half the presidents since Carter - they are behind it all. They've done exactly the same damage here in the UK, both countries are little more than burnt remnants of what they once were. Remember that the Murdocks don't care whether you live or die, whether the whole of America is crushed and destroyed, and it really does resemble a third world country - like Detroit but worse. They are the real aliens. Remember that Murdock = Fox, but it certainly doesn't end at Fox and has tendrils everywhere. Probably in most TV and other media networks. Murdock even looks a little like the elder Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars.
The problem is that the law is always fallible and with the steadily increasing power of the ultra rich has been gradually manipulated to become increasingly fallible. Today innocence is decided far more by wealth and the power of your legal team (and maybe behind the scenes corruption) than guilt or innocence. This is true in the US the UK and I'm sure many other places. Just a few days ago Rebekah Brooks was found innocent here in the UK despite being as obviously guilty as a child with its face still covered with stolen cake. Her argument was that she didn't know what was happening in her own editorial offices despite that the law was being broken systematically on a daily basis, not tens of times but thousands of times, at least. These crime was so widely known even at the time (beginning in the 1980's) that there were national jokes about it on TV. The Murdoch's also got away scot free, and really the only people to get punished were the little people who were sacrificed as scapegoats. Heavy (again industrial scale) police corruption is also implicated, as always when they commit crime the British police demonstrate an amazing ability at lying and subverting justice and at protecting each others backs.
Statistically Greenpeace have helped to kill maybe 5 to 10 million people. (with their 40 yr campaign to promote coal mining by stopping nuclear power)
Funny thing, those MEMs accelerometers and gyro's also use power. The core elements vibrate and the oscillations produce a feedback signal which is amplified through a special signal / op-amp.
He absolutely got it right. "Net neutrality" commies would apparently argue that a restaurant should be forced to have all entrees at the same price, e.g. lobster $5, hamburger $5, corn dog $5. What are there, maybe a dozen or so of us left in Amerika that believe in free markets?
You are half right, markets certainly can be over-regulated. However - in a socialist system we have rules and laws created by the government that protect the customer and the little guy if say a company rips them off. In a true free market there are no protections of any kind. In that kind of system things like stealing are only crimes if you are weak and poor. When the rich and powerful steal it is their right and privilege. That is the real law of the jungle and the 1%ers want it back - the tragedy is that we and especially people like you are gradually giving it back to them.
I think its a pretty nonsensical claim. It is not a quantum computer but only 'a computer that uses quantum effects.' Well transistors use a quantum effect so we could really make the same claim about any computer.
I have done work on the edges of quantum computation, and have to say that I think that real quantum computers are still miles off. The model I am working on is totally fringe - but it emerged from looking at the human brain. Now there is a machine that is a real 'quantum computer' and works at room temperatures. The brains secret is very simple, life does its engineering at an atomic/ molecular scale, and the brains quantum engine is made of individual molecules. The really difficult bit is how it scales it all up to the nerve, axon level and up to the whole brain. If my model turns out to be correct the basic problem with todays quantum computers is something called 'transience' which is an issue they haven't even started to deal with yet. Replicating the method used by the brain might be a good solution but is not yet anywhere close to being possible - the basic tech needed to build an artificial 'quantum brain' is nanotechnology assemblers. And it seems that no one is seriously even researching them yet so that puts them at 10 to 20 years in the future. (assemblers were estimated at the same 10 to 20 years in the future - 20 years ago)
The Chinese are doing it for one overwhelming reason, many of their biggest cities are suffocating in thick smog. Not just (poorly regulated) coal but vast numbers of poorly regulated cars and bikes and diesel vehicles, plus big old fashioned polluting factories. China is like it was here in the UK or the US or Australia a few decades ago, people regularly dying from smog directly...
BTW Germanys 'green' policies actually mean a big shift away from nuclear and back to coal. The old fashioned view of Germans as efficient or engineering technocrats is way out of date, todays average German is a silly balloon headed hippy with less common sense than a drunken monkey.
The real irony with nuclear is that it is statistically over 1000 times safer than coal but is about 100 times more regulated. Rebuild a new scientifically designed regulations system for nuclear and we can cut maybe a third off the cost of new plants and about a third off the time it takes to build them. An even bigger irony is that by promoting coal the anti nuclear movement has effectively killed somewhere between 5 and 10 million people since the mid 1970's. What the world needs is a big new pro-nuclear movement to stem the seas of lies spilled by the anti-nuclear protest groups..
There's a WHO estimate that pollution from coal has killed roughly 100 million people globally in the last 100 years.. In America coal kills more than handguns and roughly as many as cars or smoking. And that's not even mentioning the long term effects of climate change.
"I am as 'hopeful' as you about it. However, he is not the first person I have seen making these arguments. Most of the ex-nuke guys I have met say about the same thing. Fusion is not in any way cost competitive. It is sorta-kinda-possible to build. But not cost competitive due to downtime of 'must fix the reactor again'. These guys are not idiots they build nuclear reactors..."
Not so sure about that. They're certainly idiots when it comes to PR, statistically coal is 1000x more dangerous than nuclear- it actually kills something like a million people every year. Yet which are the simple minded people more afraid of???. Its not just PR, the nuclear industry has lost debate after debate - the lie that plutonium is more dangerous than uranium, the lie about nuclear waste, about fuel recycling - reprocessing, the choice of reactor design, reactor fuel, over regulation, etc, etc,etc. Organizations like Greenpeace continually make up new lies about nuclear power but absolutely no one seems to be challenging them. Research is one of the real victims in this, in other technologies scientists fight for 5 or 10 % gains in efficiency, in nuclear there are clear routes to gains of something over 200% in efficiency over current designs. (eg advanced breeder cycles, or liquid or gas cored reactors)
"..... " MIT enlisted the support of a wealthy Democratic donor from Concord and the help of an influential Washington think-tank co-founded by John Kerry" " "That explains why John Kerry suddenly became mr environment. He has money on the line. He *needs* coal to go away so his nuke loans pay out."
John Kerry has a bad track record on this, in the past he did some pretty huge damage to nuclear research in the US by fighting against and helping to close the IFR before it was finished. - (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor) And its all over exactly the same mindless political posturing and panic driven hysteria (over plutonium), exactly as delivered by Greenpeace et al. - Real fact plutonium is no more dangerous than uranium. Real fact including/using plutonium as a fuel effectively doubles efficiency and halves waste.
"Mark my words there will be a dozen nuke plants being started in the next 2-3 years. 3 plants have gone from 30year being drug along 'in planning' to 'tbd in 3-4 years'. With construction crews on site building towers. That is just in the last month."
Now that has to be a fantasy,.I would love to see it but will only believe its true when I see it happening.
As for fusion if it had been given any kind of proper funding, or a scientific bureaucracy that knew its 'arse from its elbow' we would already have working fusion plants, probably a decade ago. As it is the international team building it have a tiny and sporadic dribble of funding, enormous bureaucracy, constant infighting. If space was organized like that we would still be arguing whether it was possibly for humans to reach the moon or probably even orbit. Commercial fusion may still be 50 years way if it was treated like a priority that could be done in 10 to 15... One year of pointless war in Iraq - 40+ billion dollars could completely fund development from end to end.
Its a very complicated problem, but maybe we should look at the roots of that culture. - It all boils down to a lack of hope and real opportunities over generations basically all caused by poverty. Then combine and add in anti-intellectualism with low quality poor education, drugs, and offer only criminal culture or celebrity or sport as ways out.. Another big problem is over-socialisation which leaves children very vulnerable to peer pressure, combine that with a lack of positive intellectual role models - which lowers average intelligence, and the whole thing mixed together in a barrel of low brow extremely uninspiring anti-intellectual media.
Its amazing people form that culture do as well as they do. - I think you know the solution fix all the above things and you're 90% of the way there.
The final impediment is the real problem and the real cause of most of the anti-intellectual bias - and that is overbearing religion in its many guises. Now that is a problem for the whole of America, religion relies far too much on brain washing and indoctrination, including social pressure. Break that and things like crack or heroine will almost cure themselves. The solution is to teach people how it works or to use counter brainwashing techniques.
Don't kid yourself, at the beginning of WWII Britain was pretty racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, as was the US. In the US black people weren't allowed to sit on the same bus seats as white people or even use the same toilets.
I am by no means disillusioned as to the racist proclivities of the Western powers in the mid 20th Century. My point was the Western power's level of racism were fairly mild when compared to those of pre-WWII Germany and Japan. And the Western powers had governments that allowed those attitudes to change in the right direction.
What the Germans did was far worse but that did not make the racism or anti-Semitism among the western Allies mild. There were the 'gay panic' laws which effectively made it legal to kill people who were gay, and there was a cultural promotion and encouragement of gay bashing and murder and brutality - and that existed in both the UK and US and elsewhere. And in the US back then justice was skewed so that someone white murdering someone black would often face very little chance of punishment. The real thing that tells you how racist people were are the film and radio programs and newspapers of the time - but an awful lot has been hidden or destroyed since in the name of political correctness or expediency - or politeness. Some of the old Pathe news reels for instance were full of racism - we were the superior race and everyone else was inferior.... I think that a big part of the reason why the world really changed so much after the war was because people were confronted by the atrocities that were committed in the death camps..
Just goes to show you, that no matter how deep you go there is always another layer, I didn't know that the mass sterilisations programs ever also extended to black people. There were people in the US who tried to set up the same kind of program to mass sterilize the mentally sub-normal people.
Yes but the real real problem is that this gangsta culture with all its problems is becoming the mainstream. Not only is it everywhere in America but it has spread throughout Europe and elsewhere and is the thing kids everywhere have been tuning to for years. Now fixing that is a far bigger problem than anything to do with tech or IT recruitment. And it isn't something we can just leave to people inside that culture - by definition they don't have the power to fight it - they are brainwashed not to fight it - the world needs to value the lives of these people more and try to help them.
Hmmm...guessing in your part of the world the Japanese started WWII. And we all know the Japanese were a paragon of racial harmony especially back then. Even the European part that started much later was primarily an effort to fight against an obscenely racist power. By no means were the Western Powers perfect but they're better than most of the alternatives. Think the British were bad? Try to picture India ruled by Hitler's Germany and Hirohito's Japan.
Don't kid yourself, at the beginning of WWII Britain was pretty racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, as was the US. In the US black people weren't allowed to sit on the same bus seats as white people or even use the same toilets. As for the Germans they were obviously very racist but their primary targets were - the Jews and the Romany gypsies, the mentally ill and gay German people, and the communists - all white. They certainly weren't friendly to black people but were no worse than the Allies - a classic case of lying by omission. As for India the Germans funded and aided the rebellion there forcing the British to agree to independence after the war.
As for Soviet Russia the old uncensored 'pre-Stalin' version of the history says that Stalin had killed between maybe 10 and 20 million East Europeans including 1.5 million Jews during WWII - for largely racist reasons, and to make those lands easier to conquer and control. After the end of the cold war the official media changed the figures to make Hitler responsible for those crimes as well and today there is no way to know which side actually did kill them. The Soviets were incredibly good at lying, and cover ups, brainwashing and propaganda, spying and infiltration - McCarthy got the wrong people but he wasn't totally wrong. Of course the UK and US were pretty good at lying and deceit too, but my bet is on the Soviet version being the one that is more untrue.
How much work does it take to create it ? type two letters. Did he actually invent it? No absolutely not - search through historical literature and I guarantee that somewhere there will be pie symbols with full stops - probably some that are over 100 years old. This copywrite-trademark is just another attempt at legal theft.
The question is will it be the good China or the bad China? (Ever heard of Iron Hammer brand?) I can imagine them landing on Mars and trying to open the door and the handle comes off because its made of cheap metal - or maybe that will only in the space craft the Chinese will sell us...
There is a curious problem in the physics of star gates. A universe where FTL travel is possible is pretty much incompatible with one where stable long distance worm holes are possible. (Stargate has both)
The basic problem is that while general relativity looks very good at sub-light speeds it becomes complete rubbish at faster speeds. In any sane FTL model space is impossible to fold- except on tiny or quantum scales. An FTL space also requires something called an FTL Simultaneity - but this is incompatible with relativities space time. The solution is to restrict space time to quantum scales (that is my solution). This also means that 'traditional' time travel is impossible because effectively time only exists as a point.
As for FTL travel itself - it may be possible but looks astronomically difficult. The real problem is that with an FTL model we go from knowing 99% of all physics to probably less than half. The current guess work about the nature of mass (real, imaginary, zero, etc) and so on seems to be wrong. For instance it looks like photons have imaginary mass, it also looks like we have to rewrite some rules for antimatter to have a new type with negative mass - which may just also be dark matter. We also get problems with the 'convolution filter' and context which makes simple looking questions like 'the speed of light' a nightmarishly complex issue. If you want to open Pandora's box the first rule is that a speed is a component of a vector. The real truth though is that the FTL barrier stops looking like a simple impermeable wall and becomes something immensely complex that extends throughout physics. (the wave behaviour of light is an FTL interaction, magnetic fields are (look like) an FTL extension of electric fields, gravity becomes an FTL extension of ?? inertia, etc)
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Scaling the size of the claim with the size of the mining operation is a really good idea. Holding a claim open is another problem - I would suggest that it must remain permanently occupied and/or in operation. Otherwise people could just send out hundreds of tiny probes to blanket a body or large area, effectively claiming the whole region.
Its a great pity. Its also throwing away what may be a perfectly good human body. Someone could have used that for something, like sex slave or medical experiments or something - he could even be a crash test dummy for other cars, maybe Teslas. :D Criminals are such wasters...
Its either busses or trucks that are the number one killers of cyclists. Heavy, slow moving and surrounded by blind spots, and if you go under the wheels of a truck or bus there's pretty much no coming back. Squelch! Very often the driver wont even know they've hit someone.
Yep. No matter how bad we are and how enslave our people the other side will always find a way to be worse. Don't much fancy China's ideas of human rights, or of health and safety, or 'freedom of speech'. Space dominated by the Russians or the Arab kingdoms could be even worse.
BTW - this kind of large scale asteroid mining or any large scale stuff in space is basically all impossible without nuclear rockets.
- Settling a colony anywhere out in space will require sovereignty, + any kind of confrontation out there will require weapons, so the first thing people will need to do is to get rid of some of those international treaties. Getting those self-serving UN bureaucrats to write laws about space has created a load of stupid unworkable laws unfit for any purpose except blocking all progress. A bit like their environmental work, or tackling world poverty, or justice, morality, actually almost everything they do. (Like the UK government most of the time they would do a better job if all just killed and stuffed and mounted in their seats. :D )
I totally agree with the article. For the application I am designing (admittedly a pretty special one) this problem means that it turns out to be easier to cut everything out and build a complete new system from first principles. ... and that makes it an almost impossible job to reverse engineer to build a new clean OS for even the most basic operation. The OS layer is the real reason that everything above has become so complex.
At the top level there just isn't quite the level of control there and delving deeper on how to do things at a system-API level reveals a nightmare world of complexity and still insufficient control. At the next level Microsoft is totally out because everything is proprietary and hidden and the licence basically forbids it anyway. Even Linux isn't much better once you dig down deep enough (though the documentation is there) - most practical installations depend on proprietary code - but even when that barrier isn't there this is a system (ie effectively a big program) that has evolved organically for decades. It gets immensely complex if you have to rewrite an underlying part of that system. But all of this is only getting to the real punch-line, that thicket of evolution doesn't end at the OS and goes right through the driver and into the hardware
If you really want a clean system for programming then its simplest to go with embedded microcontrollers like Arduino, or machines like the Raspberry Pi that is complex but is designed to hide it. Or if a little braver you can use Verilog or VHDL and use FPGA to literally build the whole thing up from the ground level. That way you can control everything. Of course doing it this way is why my dev timeline is 5 to 10 years rather than 2 or 3 years - but then my project is at the frontiers of research ... (cackles manically and runs off)
You just have to ask Clippy.
So in other words you believe your perception, backed up by nothing, to be actual fact and you intend to conduct your professional life accordingly. I can tell you if I had to choose between you and almost anybody else who would get the interview.
Here's a hint to work on your thinking a bit: you know anything about government employees because it is possible to learn things about them. You know nothing about the fraud, waste, and abuse rampant in the private sector because their records are not open, their employees' records are not accessible, and their everyday decisions don't have to be made knowing some armchair quarterback will criticize your every move. So you move carefully.
Add to that the constant media drumbeat designed to reinforce your perceptions because government properly run is the ONLY effective countermeasure to corporate excess and you have, well, you.
Most of that drumbeat comes from the evil empire of the Murdock's. They have done everything they can to corrode and corrupt and destroy government power and democracy in countries throughout the world, especially in the US and UK. Every bit of venomous hate towards the US government, the psychotic conspiracy theory mind-set, the actual birth of the neo-cons themselves, the election of at least half the presidents since Carter - they are behind it all.
They've done exactly the same damage here in the UK, both countries are little more than burnt remnants of what they once were. Remember that the Murdocks don't care whether you live or die, whether the whole of America is crushed and destroyed, and it really does resemble a third world country - like Detroit but worse.
They are the real aliens. Remember that Murdock = Fox, but it certainly doesn't end at Fox and has tendrils everywhere. Probably in most TV and other media networks. Murdock even looks a little like the elder Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars.
The problem is that the law is always fallible and with the steadily increasing power of the ultra rich has been gradually manipulated to become increasingly fallible. Today innocence is decided far more by wealth and the power of your legal team (and maybe behind the scenes corruption) than guilt or innocence. This is true in the US the UK and I'm sure many other places.
Just a few days ago Rebekah Brooks was found innocent here in the UK despite being as obviously guilty as a child with its face still covered with stolen cake. Her argument was that she didn't know what was happening in her own editorial offices despite that the law was being broken systematically on a daily basis, not tens of times but thousands of times, at least. These crime was so widely known even at the time (beginning in the 1980's) that there were national jokes about it on TV. The Murdoch's also got away scot free, and really the only people to get punished were the little people who were sacrificed as scapegoats. Heavy (again industrial scale) police corruption is also implicated, as always when they commit crime the British police demonstrate an amazing ability at lying and subverting justice and at protecting each others backs.
If we are honest neither is the USA it is also pretty much a continent.. : )
The propellers spin at a very high speed so make a lot of noise.
Statistically Greenpeace have helped to kill maybe 5 to 10 million people. (with their 40 yr campaign to promote coal mining by stopping nuclear power)
Funny thing, those MEMs accelerometers and gyro's also use power. The core elements vibrate and the oscillations produce a feedback signal which is amplified through a special signal / op-amp.
He absolutely got it right. "Net neutrality" commies would apparently argue that a restaurant should be forced to have all entrees at the same price, e.g. lobster $5, hamburger $5, corn dog $5. What are there, maybe a dozen or so of us left in Amerika that believe in free markets?
You are half right, markets certainly can be over-regulated.
However - in a socialist system we have rules and laws created by the government that protect the customer and the little guy if say a company rips them off. In a true free market there are no protections of any kind. In that kind of system things like stealing are only crimes if you are weak and poor. When the rich and powerful steal it is their right and privilege. That is the real law of the jungle and the 1%ers want it back - the tragedy is that we and especially people like you are gradually giving it back to them.
I think its a pretty nonsensical claim. It is not a quantum computer but only 'a computer that uses quantum effects.' Well transistors use a quantum effect so we could really make the same claim about any computer.
I have done work on the edges of quantum computation, and have to say that I think that real quantum computers are still miles off. The model I am working on is totally fringe - but it emerged from looking at the human brain. Now there is a machine that is a real 'quantum computer' and works at room temperatures. The brains secret is very simple, life does its engineering at an atomic/ molecular scale, and the brains quantum engine is made of individual molecules. The really difficult bit is how it scales it all up to the nerve, axon level and up to the whole brain.
If my model turns out to be correct the basic problem with todays quantum computers is something called 'transience' which is an issue they haven't even started to deal with yet. Replicating the method used by the brain might be a good solution but is not yet anywhere close to being possible - the basic tech needed to build an artificial 'quantum brain' is nanotechnology assemblers. And it seems that no one is seriously even researching them yet so that puts them at 10 to 20 years in the future. (assemblers were estimated at the same 10 to 20 years in the future - 20 years ago)
The Chinese are doing it for one overwhelming reason, many of their biggest cities are suffocating in thick smog. Not just (poorly regulated) coal but vast numbers of poorly regulated cars and bikes and diesel vehicles, plus big old fashioned polluting factories. China is like it was here in the UK or the US or Australia a few decades ago, people regularly dying from smog directly...
BTW Germanys 'green' policies actually mean a big shift away from nuclear and back to coal. The old fashioned view of Germans as efficient or engineering technocrats is way out of date, todays average German is a silly balloon headed hippy with less common sense than a drunken monkey.
The real irony with nuclear is that it is statistically over 1000 times safer than coal but is about 100 times more regulated. Rebuild a new scientifically designed regulations system for nuclear and we can cut maybe a third off the cost of new plants and about a third off the time it takes to build them.
An even bigger irony is that by promoting coal the anti nuclear movement has effectively killed somewhere between 5 and 10 million people since the mid 1970's.
What the world needs is a big new pro-nuclear movement to stem the seas of lies spilled by the anti-nuclear protest groups..
There's a WHO estimate that pollution from coal has killed roughly 100 million people globally in the last 100 years.. In America coal kills more than handguns and roughly as many as cars or smoking. And that's not even mentioning the long term effects of climate change.
"I am as 'hopeful' as you about it. However, he is not the first person I have seen making these arguments. Most of the ex-nuke guys I have met say about the same thing. Fusion is not in any way cost competitive. It is sorta-kinda-possible to build. But not cost competitive due to downtime of 'must fix the reactor again'. These guys are not idiots they build nuclear reactors..."
Not so sure about that. They're certainly idiots when it comes to PR, statistically coal is 1000x more dangerous than nuclear- it actually kills something like a million people every year. Yet which are the simple minded people more afraid of???. ,etc. Organizations like Greenpeace continually make up new lies about nuclear power but absolutely no one seems to be challenging them. Research is one of the real victims in this, in other technologies scientists fight for 5 or 10 % gains in efficiency, in nuclear there are clear routes to gains of something over 200% in efficiency over current designs. (eg advanced breeder cycles, or liquid or gas cored reactors)
Its not just PR, the nuclear industry has lost debate after debate - the lie that plutonium is more dangerous than uranium, the lie about nuclear waste, about fuel recycling - reprocessing, the choice of reactor design, reactor fuel, over regulation, etc, etc
"..... " MIT enlisted the support of a wealthy Democratic donor from Concord and the help of an influential Washington think-tank co-founded by John Kerry" "
"That explains why John Kerry suddenly became mr environment. He has money on the line. He *needs* coal to go away so his nuke loans pay out."
John Kerry has a bad track record on this, in the past he did some pretty huge damage to nuclear research in the US by fighting against and helping to close the IFR before it was finished. - (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor) And its all over exactly the same mindless political posturing and panic driven hysteria (over plutonium), exactly as delivered by Greenpeace et al.
- Real fact plutonium is no more dangerous than uranium. Real fact including/using plutonium as a fuel effectively doubles efficiency and halves waste.
"Mark my words there will be a dozen nuke plants being started in the next 2-3 years. 3 plants have gone from 30year being drug along 'in planning' to 'tbd in 3-4 years'. With construction crews on site building towers. That is just in the last month."
Now that has to be a fantasy,.I would love to see it but will only believe its true when I see it happening.
As for fusion if it had been given any kind of proper funding, or a scientific bureaucracy that knew its 'arse from its elbow' we would already have working fusion plants, probably a decade ago. As it is the international team building it have a tiny and sporadic dribble of funding, enormous bureaucracy, constant infighting. If space was organized like that we would still be arguing whether it was possibly for humans to reach the moon or probably even orbit. Commercial fusion may still be 50 years way if it was treated like a priority that could be done in 10 to 15... One year of pointless war in Iraq - 40+ billion dollars could completely fund development from end to end.
Its a very complicated problem, but maybe we should look at the roots of that culture. - It all boils down to a lack of hope and real opportunities over generations basically all caused by poverty. Then combine and add in anti-intellectualism with low quality poor education, drugs, and offer only criminal culture or celebrity or sport as ways out.. Another big problem is over-socialisation which leaves children very vulnerable to peer pressure, combine that with a lack of positive intellectual role models - which lowers average intelligence, and the whole thing mixed together in a barrel of low brow extremely uninspiring anti-intellectual media.
Its amazing people form that culture do as well as they do. - I think you know the solution fix all the above things and you're 90% of the way there.
The final impediment is the real problem and the real cause of most of the anti-intellectual bias - and that is overbearing religion in its many guises. Now that is a problem for the whole of America, religion relies far too much on brain washing and indoctrination, including social pressure. Break that and things like crack or heroine will almost cure themselves. The solution is to teach people how it works or to use counter brainwashing techniques.
Don't kid yourself, at the beginning of WWII Britain was pretty racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, as was the US. In the US black people weren't allowed to sit on the same bus seats as white people or even use the same toilets.
I am by no means disillusioned as to the racist proclivities of the Western powers in the mid 20th Century. My point was the Western power's level of racism were fairly mild when compared to those of pre-WWII Germany and Japan. And the Western powers had governments that allowed those attitudes to change in the right direction.
What the Germans did was far worse but that did not make the racism or anti-Semitism among the western Allies mild. There were the 'gay panic' laws which effectively made it legal to kill people who were gay, and there was a cultural promotion and encouragement of gay bashing and murder and brutality - and that existed in both the UK and US and elsewhere. And in the US back then justice was skewed so that someone white murdering someone black would often face very little chance of punishment. The real thing that tells you how racist people were are the film and radio programs and newspapers of the time - but an awful lot has been hidden or destroyed since in the name of political correctness or expediency - or politeness. Some of the old Pathe news reels for instance were full of racism - we were the superior race and everyone else was inferior....
I think that a big part of the reason why the world really changed so much after the war was because people were confronted by the atrocities that were committed in the death camps..
Wow. I was not aware of the forced sterilization programs in Britain and the US.
Just goes to show you, that no matter how deep you go there is always another layer, I didn't know that the mass sterilisations programs ever also extended to black people. There were people in the US who tried to set up the same kind of program to mass sterilize the mentally sub-normal people.
Yes but the real real problem is that this gangsta culture with all its problems is becoming the mainstream. Not only is it everywhere in America but it has spread throughout Europe and elsewhere and is the thing kids everywhere have been tuning to for years. Now fixing that is a far bigger problem than anything to do with tech or IT recruitment. And it isn't something we can just leave to people inside that culture - by definition they don't have the power to fight it - they are brainwashed not to fight it - the world needs to value the lives of these people more and try to help them.
Hmmm...guessing in your part of the world the Japanese started WWII. And we all know the Japanese were a paragon of racial harmony especially back then. Even the European part that started much later was primarily an effort to fight against an obscenely racist power. By no means were the Western Powers perfect but they're better than most of the alternatives. Think the British were bad? Try to picture India ruled by Hitler's Germany and Hirohito's Japan.
Don't kid yourself, at the beginning of WWII Britain was pretty racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, as was the US. In the US black people weren't allowed to sit on the same bus seats as white people or even use the same toilets. As for the Germans they were obviously very racist but their primary targets were - the Jews and the Romany gypsies, the mentally ill and gay German people, and the communists - all white. They certainly weren't friendly to black people but were no worse than the Allies - a classic case of lying by omission. As for India the Germans funded and aided the rebellion there forcing the British to agree to independence after the war.
As for Soviet Russia the old uncensored 'pre-Stalin' version of the history says that Stalin had killed between maybe 10 and 20 million East Europeans including 1.5 million Jews during WWII - for largely racist reasons, and to make those lands easier to conquer and control. After the end of the cold war the official media changed the figures to make Hitler responsible for those crimes as well and today there is no way to know which side actually did kill them. The Soviets were incredibly good at lying, and cover ups, brainwashing and propaganda, spying and infiltration - McCarthy got the wrong people but he wasn't totally wrong. Of course the UK and US were pretty good at lying and deceit too, but my bet is on the Soviet version being the one that is more untrue.
How much work does it take to create it ? type two letters. Did he actually invent it? No absolutely not - search through historical literature and I guarantee that somewhere there will be pie symbols with full stops - probably some that are over 100 years old. This copywrite-trademark is just another attempt at legal theft.
Problem : To many lawyers.
Solution : Less Lawyers. How about a legalized hunt??? [humour]
If there was any kind of sanity in the patent system at all, then what this Paul Ingrisano has done would be treated as a type of theft.
The question is will it be the good China or the bad China? (Ever heard of Iron Hammer brand?) I can imagine them landing on Mars and trying to open the door and the handle comes off because its made of cheap metal - or maybe that will only in the space craft the Chinese will sell us...
I know very few will probably read this but...
There is a curious problem in the physics of star gates. A universe where FTL travel is possible is pretty much incompatible with one where stable long distance worm holes are possible. (Stargate has both)
The basic problem is that while general relativity looks very good at sub-light speeds it becomes complete rubbish at faster speeds. In any sane FTL model space is impossible to fold- except on tiny or quantum scales. An FTL space also requires something called an FTL Simultaneity - but this is incompatible with relativities space time. The solution is to restrict space time to quantum scales (that is my solution). This also means that 'traditional' time travel is impossible because effectively time only exists as a point.
As for FTL travel itself - it may be possible but looks astronomically difficult. The real problem is that with an FTL model we go from knowing 99% of all physics to probably less than half. The current guess work about the nature of mass (real, imaginary, zero, etc) and so on seems to be wrong. For instance it looks like photons have imaginary mass, it also looks like we have to rewrite some rules for antimatter to have a new type with negative mass - which may just also be dark matter. We also get problems with the 'convolution filter' and context which makes simple looking questions like 'the speed of light' a nightmarishly complex issue. If you want to open Pandora's box the first rule is that a speed is a component of a vector.
The real truth though is that the FTL barrier stops looking like a simple impermeable wall and becomes something immensely complex that extends throughout physics. (the wave behaviour of light is an FTL interaction, magnetic fields are (look like) an FTL extension of electric fields, gravity becomes an FTL extension of ?? inertia, etc)